You Built Your Sukkah: Now Live in It!

In the desert, God built us sukkot to protect us from the elements. In Ledavid Hashem Ori Veyishi, the Psalm we have been reciting since the beginning of Elul, we say that God hides us in a sukkah on a bad day. The sukkah is the feeling we have of having God around us to protect us and guide us and weather the weather with us.

In the desert, God built our sukkah, but today we build our own sukkah. Indeed, we have spent the past month and a half building it. It is made of our prayers and repentance; it is woven out of our desire to be close to God – our statement of ahat sha’alti – one thing I desire and it is to dwell in God’s house. Out of these words, this song of the soul, this yearning, is indeed built a kind of sukkah, a place for us to dwell where we may feel God’s presence and protection.

The sukkah does not come out of thin air. People often complain – I would pray, but I don’t believe in God. The order is the opposite – one comes to believe in God through the very act of praying. You have to construct your own sukkah in this life, your own sacred space where you help yourself feel the divine. It is just as much work as the physical act of building that hut. And that is the work we have been doing these past weeks.

Sukkot is the holiday where we say – You built your sukkah; now live in it! In other words – you have worked so hard on this relationship; now enjoy it and live in it. Live in it now and carry it with you through the year. Reap the harvest.

On Teshuva (Returning)

Teshuvah. Returning. The return is a constant one we need to do every day and every hour in our minds. To remember what matters. To remember what our purpose is. Not to give in to despair, but to feel God’s presence amidst all that swirls around us.

Ahat sha’alti. One thing I really desire, and that is to sit in God’s house, to feel that I am not alone, that I am surrounded and buoyed by His loving presence. Though I am surrounded by a military camp, goes the Psalm, still I feel secure. Whatever craziness happens around me, I am at peace in God’s light.

But only if I remember that there is really only one thing that I desire, only if I keep track of what is important amidst the bustle, not allowing myself to get side-tracked (lo taturu) by what seems urgent and disturbing in the moment.

It is a little like meditiation. The basic instruction for meditators is simple enough – to focus on the breath. Oh, but the distractions –the thoughts and worries – that come our way when we try to maintain such focus. The goal then is a constant teshuvah, a constant feeling of return. Yes, we notice the movement away, how our minds climb like monkeys, but each time we return, we come back to that breath, we are reminded that there is a center. We are grounded and focused, and come what may, we have the power to return.

I notice my own mind’s insanities, its moods and preoccupations. We are slaves to these, and through them create our own suffering. But to break through it all, to feel that yes, there is a Oneness behind it all, that we are held in love by that One --- to be able to constantly return to this grounding notion, that is teshuvah (and that is freedom). Ahat sha’alti -- I really only want one thing, and come what may, I will return to that one thing with all my heart and with all my soul.

On Ending Kaddish

Another end. No longer will there be something that I do every single day to mark this loss, something that I do every day to say – Abba, I still love you and am doing something to take care of you. It is hard. At each other stage --- shiva, shloshim, kaddish each morning – there was something ahead that marked it as still raw and new. Now there is just a huge never-ending span of nothingness and loss. No marks. I am set loose in my pain to confront the reality, the permanent reality that this person whom I loved and who loved me is not just not here right now, but never will be. It’s like the kid in preschool who doesn’t cry the first or second day at being left by his parents, but on the third week – that’s when it sinks in that this is not just some passing thing, but that every day on and on, he will be abandoned by his parents. It seems we are born to loss and separation.

I want to say good-bye again. But this time I have to figure out a way to make the good-bye an ongoing conversation, to stand in the doorway and talk a bit longer. I know there are other ways to continue the conversation – we carry our parents’ voices around in our heads. But something about Kaddish – the repetitiveness of it, the sanctity, the way it moves up and up, connecting two worlds. It places the conversation between me and my father into a religious realm, raises it up to include a third partner, Who is now, I pray, taking care of my father.

Good-bye, Abba. Stay with me even as you move upward. Smile at me and encourage me when I am down. Believe in me. Understand me. Love me. Help me feel our connection. Oh, stay with me. And to God, take care of him. Accept him in to Your warm embrace, and comfort him for the loss of his connection to us. You are the link between us. Stay with me. Le’alam, ule’almei almaya.

Post Tisha B'Av Reflections on Mourning and Connection

What do we mourn for on Tisha B’av? A story is told in the Talmud about Rabban Gamliel. Every night he would be awakened by a neighboring woman crying for her lost son. Rabban Gamliel, hearing her, would also cry, crying with her for her loss but also for the lost Temple. The story depicts how personal and communal tragedies become intertwined. They are not separate things, this mourning for one’s son (or father) and this mourning for the Temple, but all part of the basic human yearning for connection. That open wound inside is our opening to all open wounds.

What do we mourn for on Tisha B’av? We mourn for the loss of a once more intimate feeling of God’s presence in the world. We take time to feel the pain of distance and yearning for divine connection.

This week I had a few moments of self-consciously enjoying my summer time with my children. No great shakes – just sitting out on our porch eating a snack, walking around the pond as a storm brews, holding hands, but somehow, in the sweet fleeting moments of a waning summer, these moments felt peculiarly special and intense. This is all I want in life, I thought, to be together, to be connected, to be in loving relationship.

Maybe these personal relationships are an inkling of the possibility of our connection to God – a little taste of the soul’s capacity for outreach. Ahat sha’alti, we will soon say, come the month of Elul – One thing I desire in this world, and that is “that I sit in the house of God all the days of my life.” That’s the one thing we really yearn for, and to know it, is to understand the emptiness inside us, and not to confuse it with hunger for food or recognition, but simply the basic yearning of the human soul for divine connection.

As we move from Tisha B’av toward Rosh HaShanah, may our mourning and our yearning become returning, returning to that place of connection we have somehow always known.

Parashat Balak: Becoming Like a Donkey

Something happens to Balaam in the course of delivering blessings to the Israelites against his will. Something good happens inside him – though at first, he is resistant, merely a vehicle into which God places His words, by the end, Balaam has blossomed into a genuine seer and speaker, wholly embracing his role.

As my father, z”l, first pointed out to me, the Torah’s language changes through the course of Balaam’s various oracles. While in the first two, the Torah says Vayasem davar befiv, that God placed a word (or “thing”) in his mouth, by the third time, God’s spirit actually rests upon him, a term used for genuine prophecy.

Something breaks for Balaam in the course of the second oracle. Rashi comments on this Vayasem davar pefiv, “And He placed a thing in his mouth,” explaining that this time Balaam did not want to go back and report his blessing to King Balak. And so, Rashi says, God had to physically force him to do so by putting a “thing,” a bridle or a fish hook in his mouth, to lead him like an animal to the place God wanted.

What is the result of this experience of being treated like an animal – controlled and manipulated to do God’s will? Somehow, Balaam emerges from this experience to embrace his destiny. The Torah tells us next that he “saw” – something he was unable to do as well as his donkey earlier in the story – that it was good in God’s eyes to bless the people, and so did not go in search of magic, as before, but instead lifted up his eyes and again “saw” the people, at which point, “the spirit of God came upon him.”

The oracle which follows is arguably the most beautiful of the bunch, containing the phrase we adopted into our prayerbooks, mah tovu ohalekha. It is also the only one in which Balaam mentions himself as a positive player in his environment. In the first oracle, he refers to himself only as the one invited by King Balak, and in the second not at all. Here he begins: “Word of Balaam, son of Beor, word of the man whose eye is true. Word of him who hears God’s speech, who beholds visions from the Almighty.” Balaam seems to have hit his stride now, as oracle follow oracle after this one, as if some new spout of creativity has suddenly been opened inside him.

Balaam seems to me be an example of what can happen to a person when he stop resisting his destiny and begins to embrace whatever role God has set out for him. The process in Balaam’s case involves some letting go of ego. God has to remind him clearly who is in charge here, leading him like an animal, to do his job. Balaam needs to learn to be more like his faithful donkey.

The Hasidic masters talk often, in a positive way, of learning to do just this – negating one’s ego enough to be able to feel that God is one’s master, learning to follow and be obedient like an animal, while also not losing one’s human capacities for intelligence, creativity and freedom. Somehow, ironically, as in Balaam’s case, it is in the very negation of self that the self begins to blossom, to see and to speak of its own volition, through the freely acquired spirit of God. Balaam moves from God’s slave to God’s partner, but only by first going through some process of self-abnegation, of learning to understand himself as a vehicle or vessel for the divine. It is only when he can fully sublimate himself to God’s will that his own creativity and personhood can really grow and blossom through an attachment to God.

There is here, I think, the lost art of emptying oneself to be filled from above. Balaam began with a large ego, according to tradition, but ironically, this ego blocked him from greatness. Only once he could let it go in the manner of an animal simply following his master, only once he attached that self to its Source, only then could he be fully fulfilled.

Parashat Korah: On Taking and Elevating

For me, the bottom line with Korah is the very first word of the parsha: Vayikah. And he took. He had a taking kind of attitude. The story that follows is full of words like “a lot” and “a little,” – you got a lot; no, I got a little. The whole discussion reminds me of children’s squabbles over who got the bigger cookie. It’s a taking kind of attitude, an attitude that shows a selfishness of spirit – a primary concern with I, rather than you or any other, and also an emptiness of spirit – it is out of a feeling of inner emptiness that we look to take and fill ourselves up all the time.

This taking attitude is natural and ubiquitous. We are in some way born to worry about ourselves and to concern ourselves with filling up, taking and taking to ensure we have enough. The problem with such a taking attitude is that it leads downwards – Korah was swallowed up by the earth for good reason. A taking attitude degrades us, makes us not just act, but feel lowly and petty and constrained.

What is the Torah’s antidote to this kind of taking attitude? One answer is provided by the end of the parsha: the mitzvah of terumah, of gifts for the priests. This word terumah and its verb tarimu is in some ways the answer to vayikah in the beginning of the parsha. It’s not just that instead of taking, one should be giving, but also that instead of taking, one should be “raising up,” the literal meaning of tarimu. Giving a share to the priests is one way of “raising up” what you are taking from the world. Like saying a blessing before eating, it elevates the act, creating a sense of sanctity in the environment so that one is not pulled downward like Korah, but upward.

Because fundamentally, we are and always will be takers. We eat, we wear clothing, we constantly consume resources. We take from the world around us. If the whole purpose of such taking is merely the preservation and aggrandizement of some “me,” then it does lead us downward. Somehow, there has to be some higher purpose. We are taking, but we are taking in a way that elevates. There is a notion in Hasidic thought that by performing a mitzvah with a physical object, we somehow elevate that object itself, releasing the divine sparks inside it. Even if we don’t want to go that far in the mystical direction, there can be some feeling that we are making use of resources for the sake of something larger than ourselves. In the Pirke Avot chapter from last week, it says that one should try to do all of one’s actions leshem shamayim, for the sake of heaven. What would it mean to think, before evey act, even the most mundane, this, too is for the sake of heaven? Evey act would then be elevated.

If we could do this, if we could really feel that all of our actions were sanctified by their connection to some higher purpose, not only would we feel elevated, but I suspect that we would take less – consume fewer resources and also demand less of the things Korah was craving – honor and ego-building. I suspect we would take less because that empty space inside us would already be filled up. Having elevated our every activity, we would feel the blessedness and the sanctity of small amounts, of little things, and all of it would feel large and satisfying. We would not look to grab honor from outside, because we would feel already elevated from the inside.

Parashat Shelakh: How Not to Feel Like a Grasshopper

There are different ways of being small. There is insecurity and there is humility and they are not the same thing. The 10 spies who came back from their tour of Israel saying that we will not be able to conquer the land were insecure; “we were like grasshoppers in our own eyes and so we were in their [the local giants’] eyes,” they say. Moshe, on the other hand, is humble, “the humblest man on the face of the earth,” it says right at the end of last week’s parsha, as if begging us to make exactly this contrast to the spies.

“We were like grasshoppers in our own eyes and so we were in their eyes.” I think we know what this feels like, to look at those around us and feel that they are “giants” in comparison to us, to feel our own smallness, to be so intensely aware of all the ways we are lacking to the point that we are sure so it is in others’ eyes as well – that to them, too, we must seem inadequate.

Such is the human condition that we compare ourselves to others and sometimes, perhaps often, find ourselves lacking. How does one avoid such a state? By remembering always that we are a piece of God. And by remembering that as such, each one of us has a certain majesty, a grandeur of our own, our own way of shining forth, not like a grasshopper in contrast to giants, but like a human walking alongside other humans, each with her own way of lighting the road.

The difference between those 10 spies and Yehoshua, at least (Calev, too, but for different reasons), is that Yehoshua carried this knowledge with him – that is the gift that Moshe gave him before he left, changing his name from Hoshea to Yehoshua – the gift of carrying God’s name inside his own, of carrying the knowledge that God is a part of him with every step, bringing dignity and a long range perspective to the task at hand. Yes, at this particular moment I feel really small in relation to those who live here; I am new, a stranger; that’s what it feels like to not know the lay of the land – yes, that’s how I feel at this moment, but I can also keep with me the knowledge that God is a part of me, and this knowledge keeps me steady and balanced, keeps a person from falling into the “I am nothing but a grasshopper” trap.

The end of the parsha offers the same solution to the problem of the spies. It tells us that in order not to let our eyes “scout around” (taturu, like the spies), we should wear tzitzit in order to remember the God who made us and in order to remember the mitzvot – to remember that we have a divine job to do. There is no time to look around and make comparisons and feel like grasshoppers. We have a job to do on this earth, and it is a divine appointed job no matter how inadequate we feel to fulfill it.

That is Moshe’s humility. He doesn’t wallow in grasshopper-ness to the point of avoiding his mission. At a certain point, insecurity stops leaders like the spies from doing their job. If anything, Moshe’s humility fuels his mission, because it reminds him that its purpose is not his own greatness, but being part of something larger. His awareness of his own smallness – in relation to God, not other humans --- keeps him steady and on course in fulfilling his job.